Dial M for Mischief

“Michaels can write everything from a lighthearted romp to a far more serious-themed romance. [She] has outdone herself.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews, Top Pick, on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Non-stop action from start to finish! It seems that author Kasey Michaels does nothing halfway.”

—Huntress Reviews on A Gentleman by Any Other Name

“Michaels has done it again…Witty dialogue peppers a plot full of delectable details exposing the foibles and follies of the age.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on The Butler Did It

“[A] hilarious spoof of society wedding rituals wrapped around a sensual romance filled with crackling dialogue reminiscent of The Philadelphia Story.”

—Booklist on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

“A cheerful, lighthearted read.”

—Publishers Weekly on Everything’s Coming Up Rosie

Dial M for Mischief

Kasey Michaels

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Ex-cop turned private investigator Teddy Sunshine raised his daughters to be tough and resilient, and to depend on themselves even as they’d always been able to depend on each other.And then Teddy died, supposedly committing suicide after strangling the wife of Philadelphia’s top mayoral candidate.

Jade, the eldest of Teddy’s three girls, who worked with Teddy, summons her movie-actor sister, Jolie, and investigative cable news journalist, Jessica, home for their father’s funeral.Together they vow to prove their father had not been a murderer.

The men in their lives are sympathetic, yes, but not at all happy to have the girls digging around in Teddy’s cold cases from his days on the police force, looking for the reason Teddy was killed.

Four unsolved cases had haunted Teddy.

The case of the vanishing Bride.

The shooting death of a Scholar Athlete.

The fishtown Strangler murders of six prostitutes.

And, lastly, the Baby in the dumpster, a case that still held the attention of all of the cops in Philly.

Somewhere in one of these cases, all recently worked yet again by Teddy, lay the answer to Teddy’s death.

Somewhere, in the emotional turmoil of lovers past and present, the Sunshine girls hope to find some healing, some answers and a return of some sunshine to their lives.

And somewhere out there, somebody should be very, very afraid that old crimes and new crimes are about to be solved!

Oh, and one thing more—it would seem that two of the men in their lives are descendants of Ainsley Becket, patriarch of the Beckets of Romney Marsh, and heirs to the infamous Empress, a priceless uncut emerald that remains hidden two hundred years later, waiting for its “bad luck” to wear off so it can be found.

I hope you’ll enjoy Jolie Sunshine and Sam Becket’s story.

Happy reading!

Kasey Michaels

To Diana Ventimiglia

onward and upward, baby!

Chapter One

THE SKY WAS UNUSUALLY bright the day his daughters buried Teddy Sunshine, the sun a big yellow ball chasing away all the early-morning clouds, if not the chill temperatures.

Jolie Sunshine, when she noticed the sun, wondered whether her father had ordered it up or if it was some sort of sick joke dealt them by fate.

In contrast to the brightness of the day, the small crowd around the grave site resembled nothing more than exotic black crows beneath the blue canvas canopy with Fulton Funeral Home stamped on the overhang. The only other colors were those of their pale faces and the blanket of bright red roses draping the bronze casket.

When I kick off, I want to go out like a Kentucky Derby winner—draped with roses. Big red ones. Don’t you forget!

“We remembered, Teddy,” Jolie whispered under her breath, earning her quick, inquisitive looks from her sisters, which she ignored.

Roses they could do. What his daughters couldn’t do was to have their father buried with a full police funeral. Murderers didn’t get that kind of honor.

Jolie swayed slightly between her sisters as the priest read a final prayer. The three held hands as they stood in their birth order: Jade to Jolie’s right, Jessica, the baby, to her left. Teddy’s Irish setter, Rockne, reclined stretched out at their feet, wearing his Notre Dame Fightin’ Irish kerchief around his neck.

They were quite the dazzling trio, Teddy Sunshine’s girls; Teddy’s Angels, he’d only half-jokingly called them, harking back to the days of that old television show, Charlie’s Angels, which Teddy said the movie couldn’t really hold a candle to for sheer enjoyment.

Jade could almost be typecast in the role Kate Jackson had played in the mid-seventies. Beautiful, refined and all business.

Jessica could be a fresher, more lush and whole-some Farrah Fawcett, with brains as well as looks. Although, as Jessica had pointed out more than once, her teeth weren’t as big.

But Jolie? Jolie didn’t fit Jaclyn Smith’s role, the one heavy on brains and beauty but also on sex appeal. Jolie was brunette; she was always told she was photogenic, but she had also spent most of her life believing herself to be too tall, too thin, too angular. Her mouth was too wide, her lips too full, her hair too straight, her hands and feet too long.

Hell, she’d spent most of her teenage years carrying the nickname Jolly Green Jolie.

Whenever she stood between her sisters, taller than either Jade or Jessica, she felt plain beside Jessica’s almost too-perfect beauty and stupid when compared to Jade’s quick, incisive brain—a living, breathing example of middle-child syndrome.

It was only when she was in front of the cameras that Jolie didn’t feel awkward, inept, a giraffe in a field full of graceful gazelles. When the lights came on, all her self-doubt disappeared and she could be anyone she dreamed she could be.

How she longed to be somebody else today, rather than a grieving daughter. How she longed to talk to Teddy Sunshine just one more time, watch as his big Irish smile lit up a room brighter than any Hollywood klieg lights and made her feel so very special, so very loved.

Most of all, she wanted to hear his laugh, a laugh that could fill her world.

But now—in the shade beneath the blue canvas tarp, except for the droning voice of Father Sheehan and the sobbing of two maiden aunts from Buffalo Jolie would have been hard-pressed to name correctly—silence, cold and uncomfortable, was all around them.

There should be a Philadelphia Police Department honor guard in attendance, at the very least. Taps played. A salute fired. A flag ceremoniously folded and presented to Jade, as the oldest.

But the Sunshine daughters had to make do with a priest who had never known Teddy, filling in for Father Muskie, who was on his annual vacation in the Canadian north woods and out of touch, unknowing that his good friend and gin rummy partner had died in disgrace.

What the Sunshine funeral did have was press. Lots of it. Print and television news, along with about two dozen dredges of the tabloid-journalism pool, paparazzi hoping for a few good photographs, and some Mary Hart look-alike from one of the evening celebrity-magazine shows.

The local reporters had shown up to put a fairly boring cap on the Teddy Sunshine story: the ex-cop turned P.I. who’d eaten his gun after squeezing the life out of mayoral candidate Joshua Brainard’s beautiful wife.

The rest were here for Jolie Sunshine, movie star—and may they all go straight to hell.

Rockne slowly clambered to his feet as the priest walked past, shaking hands with all three Sunshine daughters, and then collapsed onto his belly once more, raising his sad brown eyes to Jolie. He hadn’t eaten anything for the past two days, even when she had gotten down on the floor early this morning and gone face-to-face with him, one of his favorite treats clamped between her teeth as she’d mumbled, “Yum-yums. ’Ook, ’Ock-nee, yum-yums.”

Now there was a picture for the tabloids: Movie Star Fights Pooch for Doggy Treat, Fears Rise Over Mental Collapse of Fan-Fave Sunshine.

Like she’d give them the satisfaction. She’d get through this. They’d all get through this.

“Okay, it’s over, Jolie. Time to say our last goodbyes,” her sister Jade told her quietly.

Jolie felt her knees threaten to buckle once more but steeled herself to remain upright. When they left the grave site, the workmen standing under those trees over there would come back, lower Teddy into the ground, locking away all the real sunshine in her life forever. She wasn’t ready for that. “No, not yet. Please, not yet.”

Jade sighed, squeezed Jolie’s hand. Jade, the oldest and, even now, in the midst of their nightmare, the practical one. The one who had stayed with Teddy, worked with Teddy in the Sunshine Detective Agency. The one who had come home to discover Teddy’s body and then called her sisters, broken the news to them without tears, without hysterics. Just, “Daddy’s dead—I need you here. Now.”

“Honey, we have to face the cameras. One last time, and then we can go home, begin to figure this thing out. Okay?”

“Come on, Jolie, Jade’s right,” her sister Jessica urged. “We’ll face them together. Just ignore the slimy bastards, say ‘No comment’ if you say anything at all as we keep moving toward the limo. You know the drill.”

Jolie looked wryly at her sister, the blond bombshell who was currently on sabbatical from her own job as an on-air investigative reporter. “Slimy bastards, Jess? Aren’t they your comrades-in-arms?”

Jessica rolled her huge sherry-brown eyes even as she tossed her head, her long blond hair falling forward once more to frame her face. “Puh-leez. I’m the real deal. What’s waiting on the other side of the road are the dregs of humanity. Entertainment reporters? Bottom-feeding, scum-sucking dirtbags, that’s all they are. But we’re not going to let them get to us. Right?”

Jolie nodded. “Right. Just give me another minute. Just…just one more minute.”

Jessica looked past Jolie to Jade, who only shrugged her shoulders and left the two of them standing where they were while she retrieved a trio of long-stemmed red roses the undertaker had provided. “Here, one for each of us. Jolie? Come on, honey. Follow me, do what I do.”

“Yes, Mother,” Jolie said, smiling for the first time in days as she took the rose. She was an actress. She would act. The grieving daughter approaching at the graveside, kissing the petals of a drooping rose and then placing it on top of the casket that was really empty, a prop, a part of the scene, that’s all. She was the Mafia wife bidding farewell to her mobster husband, gunned down as he ate his favorite pasta in his favorite mobster restaurant. The sweetheart of a fallen World War I soldier who’d perished somewhere in France. The sister of a frontier sheriff ambushed on the streets of Laredo.

Her hand barely shook as she gently laid the bloom on top of the blanket of roses. She was acting. It was all a sham. This wasn’t real. Teddy wasn’t dead. Her daddy wasn’t—

“Oh, God, I’m sorry I’m being such a jerk. Let’s just get out of here before I lose it,” Jolie whispered as she stepped back from the casket and bent down to grab Rockne’s leash. She pushed past Jade, who had been stopped by one of the anonymous, interchangeable aunts.

“What’s the rush? Oh, you want to leave now, Jolie? What a fantastic idea,” Jessica muttered, following after her. “Jade and I would never have thought of that on our own—you long-legged dork-stork.”

“Stuff it, Barbie doll—if you don’t already—and go rescue Einstein from the aunts, will you? I’ll go ahead to the limo, keep the cameras off you guys if I can.” Jolie squared her shoulders. They were the Sunshine girls. They’d hung in this long and they were going to get through this!

None of them had cried throughout the funeral mass or the short ceremony at the grave site; they wouldn’t give anyone that satisfaction. All Jolie wanted now—all she was sure the three of them wanted now—was to get this done, get this over and go back to the house Jade had shared with their father.

The house where he had sat in his study, surrounded by a lifetime of achievements nailed to the walls, and used his service revolver to blow his brains all over those signed photographs and commendations.

Jolie looked across the cemetery with its flat bronze plaques fairly hidden in the well-manicured grass, giving the area the appearance of a wide, green park. Pretty, even peaceful, if not for the crowd being held behind rope barricades on the far side of the macadam roadway that wound through the center of the cemetery.

As she and Rockne moved toward the limousine, eager arms were raised and she could hear the whir and snap of two dozen cameras, had to blink at the sharp shafts of sunlight reflected from many of the telephoto lenses pointed in her direction.

Her mouth went dry. Her heart pounded with pain and anger. She wanted to run, longed to run. Felt her hands bunching into fists at her sides because she wanted to hit someone, shake someone, demand to know if they really believed the “public’s right to know” extended to being voyeurs at a funeral.

But she knew she had to keep walking slowly, at an unhurried pace, her head held high, her face shielded somewhat by the large, round sunglasses.

Jolie swore she could hear her father’s big, encouraging voice whispering in her ear.

That’s the way. One foot in front of the other, Jolie, baby, and soon you’ll be walkin’ right out that door…

She was almost there, almost at the limo. She had to hang on just another minute, and they would be out of this madness.

There were a half dozen rent-a-cops on the scene for crowd control, and yet someone wasn’t on the job. One of the paparazzi slipped through the line to do an end-run around the hearse and toward Jolie, snapping his camera as he approached.

“Jolie! Look here! Look over here! Toss the glasses, babe! Let’s see those big baby blues! Come on, honey, you owe your fans something, right?”

Steady, girl. One foot in front of the other…

The rent-a-cops stood back as the photographer edged closer. He dropped to one knee to get a good shot, the telephoto lens still in place. Jolie madly wondered if her fans really needed a close-up of the hairs in her nose.

“Hey, Jolie! What’s it feel like knowing your daddy was a murderer? Gotta be tough, right?”

Something inside her snapped, actually went br-oi-i-n-g. She took a step toward the photographer.

“That’s it, Jolie—nearly perfect. Now ditch the glasses.”

“Don’t do it, Jolie,” Jessica called out, jogging toward her as quickly as she could in four-inch heels. “Don’t react. Just let it go.”

“The hell with that. Come on, Jolie. Look this way. You smile for us when you want us around. Smile for us now!”

Aw, the bloody blue devil with it, sweetheart—go give him a good conk!

Jolie would probably never remember how she got from point A to point B, but she was suddenly there, looking down on the son of a bitch who was still shooting frame after frame up into her face. She’d rather not remember grabbing the camera from him even as she kicked front with one foot, connected with his chest and sent him sprawling on his back on top of Bertha M. Pierce, 1917-2003, beloved wife of Henry.

Yanking open the back of the camera, Jolie ripped out the film, exposing it to the sun, and then pulled back her arm, ready to throw the camera in the photographer’s face. She knew the other photographers and video cameramen were having a field day from their vantage point across the road, but she didn’t care. She’d needed a target for all her anger, her grief, her frustration, and this bozo had volunteered for the job.

And then she heard the scream.

Turning, with the camera still in midair, Jolie saw the interchangeable great-aunts ten yards behind her.

One of them—Aunt Marie; or maybe it was Aunt Theresa—had her right leg jammed up to the knee in a hole in the ground. She wasn’t screaming, even though her mouth was open and moving. She was white-faced with terror.

“Help! Help!” the other aunt, the screamer, cried hysterically. “Somebody’s trying to pull her down!”

Jolie let the camera fall to the ground as Jade and Jessica joined her, the three of them now staring at the aunts. “What in hell…?”

“Gopher hole,” the undertaker explained quietly as he walked past the girls. “Happens a couple of times every summer, and they always think one of the dearly departed is reaching up to get them. I’ll dig her out. I keep a shovel in the hearse.”

Jolie forgot about the cameras, forgot about the reporters, even forgot her anger. She involuntarily drew in her breath, air sucking in so long and so hard she thought she might have forgotten how to exhale. And then, when she believed she might faint, something inside of her released. She let loose with a fountain of laughter that had built up inside her and now exploded from her, totally beyond her control.

She laughed until she had to bend over, brace her hands on her knees. And still she laughed.

She laughed until the laughter turned to tears. Hard, racking sobs that sent her down to her knees, because Teddy would have loved the gopher hole so much and then later woven the incident into a huge story twice as funny as what had actually happened.

“Come on, baby, showtime’s over.”

Jolie stiffened at the touch of hands closing around her shoulders, pulling her to her feet. She turned around slowly…to look up into a face she hadn’t seen in five long years.

“Sam? Oh, God…Sam…”

“Yeah, Sam. We’ve got that covered,” Sam Becket said as he slid a protective arm around her shoulders and guided her away from the limousine and toward a sleek black Mercedes parked at the bend of the macadam road. “Your sisters can manage, but we’ve got to get you out of here.”

Jolie tried to slow her steps, but Sam kept a strong grip on her as he hastened her across the grass. “I can’t just leave them to—”

“You can, you are, and for once in your big, independent life you’re going to let someone else take care of you, damn it,” he told her. He opened the passenger door and all but folded her in half to shove her into the front seat as the bottom-feeders stampeded in their direction, cameras flashing and whirring. They plastered their cameras against the side window and windshield, and Jolie covered her face with her hands.

Sam opened the driver’s-side door, pausing a moment to say, “You’ve got three seconds to back off, people. Move it or lose it.”

One of the reporters, microphone in hand now, pushed even closer. The guy had bottle-blond hair, an indoor tan and too-white capped teeth that might make him look good on television but up close and personal he looked a little like a beaver. “Oh, yeah?” he yelled the challenge. “And who are you? Who the hell are you!’

“Me? Well, I’ll tell you, Bucky—I’m the guy who’s leaving now. Two seconds. Which one of you losers wants to be my new hood ornament?”

“You won’t do that. We have a right to—”

Sam’s door slammed. He shoved the key in the ignition and put the transmission into Drive. One quick warning tap on the horn and the large car moved forward.

“Sam, you can’t just run them down,” Jolie warned him, at last realizing what she’d done. “I shouldn’t have snapped like that. I know the drill, I know what they are. I—Sam, don’t!

Outside the car, someone yowled in pain and the rest of the barracudas scurried to safety.

“Oops. Guess I might have rolled over a foot or two, huh?” Sam said, smiling at her. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t as if they weren’t warned. Duck your head, Jolie, we’re almost out of range.”

“My publicist is either going to hug you or shoot you. Me, too, come to think about it,” Jolie said as the Mercedes came to a halt just past the wrought-iron gates, then turned out onto the highway.

“Do you care?”

She looked at him, seriously considering the question. “No, I don’t think I do.” She searched in her pocket and came out with a wad of tissues to wipe at her eyes. “Thank you, Sam. You didn’t have to do this.”

“What can I say? Underdog to the rescue?” He flashed a quick grin at her, and Jolie’s stomach executed a small but powerful flip. How did men do it? Women just got older—and quickly, especially in Hollywood. But men? Men aged, like wine. Sam Becket, she should have realized, could be considered nothing less than the finest vintage.

“All the superheroes to choose from, and you chose Underdog?”

“I guess I’m just a sucker for long, floppy ears.”

“Oh, my gosh—Rockne! I let go of his leash!”

“Jade has him,” Sam said as he moved into the passing lane, one eye on the rearview mirror. “Hold on, we’ve got a tail.”

“No, you have a tail. You’re Underdog, remember?” Jolie turned around on the seat and looked out the rear window. “So can this thing outrun a news van with a honking-huge satellite dish on top?”

To answer her question, Sam put the pedal to the metal, so that Jade had to hold on as she tried to turn around in her seat once more and buckle herself in tight. “How could I have forgotten what a show-off you are?” she asked him, leaning her head back against the headrest as he cut in and out of traffic, the speedometer edging past eighty in the thankfully thin late-morning traffic.

He was all concentration now, and Jolie took the opportunity to look at him more closely. His profile was still sharp, his nose straight and perfect, his cheekbones high, his brow smooth and unlined, his chin rock-solid as he edged past the sunny side of thirty. Thirty-three? Thirty-four? She should probably remember that, but she didn’t.

What she remembered was the thick, dirty-blond hair he wore shorter than the last time she’d seen him, and rather tousled—the kind of tousled that probably cost two hundred bucks a haircut. His fine, unblemished skin was a golden tan, although his right hand was a bit more pale, proving that he’d found time to get in a few rounds of golf while running Becket Imports, one of the many holdings of the embarrassingly rich Becket family.

Mostly what she remembered was how her body fit so well against Sam’s long, lean frame, the top of her head coming up to his chin, when she seemed to tower over most men. The way his hands had moved over her skin, the taste of his mouth, the intense, soul-exploding look in his green eyes as their two bodies merged…

“Where…uh, where are we going?”

“It would be rather senseless to lose the press and then go straight back to your father’s house, don’t you think?”

She nodded, biting her bottom lip. “True. So where are we going?”

“My place,” he said, dipping his head and looking across at her above the silver rims of his sunglasses. “Do you mind?”

Jolie shook her head, ignoring another quick stomach flip. “I don’t think I’m ready to go back home yet, so, no, I don’t mind. You know, I was so busy trying not to look at anybody that I didn’t even see you this morning. Were you at the church?”

“Sorry, no. I was out of the country until late last night and only saw the newspaper clippings my secretary put on my desk when I got to the office this morning. And since I haven’t said it yet, I’m really sorry about Teddy. He was a hell of a guy.”